Lofty ideals in dirty-talking 'Aristocrats'

Steven Winn

Published 4:00 am, Thursday, August 18, 2005

"The Aristocrats," a movie about a relentlessly lewd, scatological, appalling and altogether repellent joke, ought to be on everyone's must-see list in 2005 -- but not because the joke (about a family's unspeakable acts performed as a vaudeville routine) is so funny.

The joke, in fact, is beside the point in "The Aristocrats." It's told --

setup, punch line and all -- early on in this 86-minute documentary and then submitted to a baroque series of retellings, variations, deconstructions, analyses, physical stunts, delicious riffs, zany reversals and deadpan bafflement by dozens of stand-up comics and other showbiz figures.

What counts here, and counts for plenty, is the sheer exuberant excess of the movie, its extravagant reveling in and devoted attention to bad taste. You might not think of it, as you're listening to George Carlin or Bob Saget work their way through the joke's boundless terrain of bestiality, incest and the creative use of human waste products. And it might not occur to you, as the references to vomit, sex with infants and the crucifixion pile up. But "The Aristocrats" is a paean to free speech, a gleeful, unrestrained celebration of saying the unsayable out loud. The movie is a tonic, an old-fashioned raspberry in the face of a culture that seems eerily adrift from the core principle of an open, clamorous expression of ideas.

The film, directed by Paul Provenza and Penn Jillette, doesn't accomplish that by taking a stand or making any kind of larger case for its material. It does it by being itself. It's as big and blatant as the manic, mobile, wildly different faces that fill the screen: Paul Reiser, Don Rickles, Whoopi Goldberg, Bruce Vilanch, Susie Essman, Phyllis Diller, Carrot Top, Chris Rock and Drew Carey. The Swiftian vulgarity and obscenity are essential. They're the whoopee-cushion, siren-and-whistle alerts, the only sort of sounds that make us sit up and take notice in today's queasy, somnolent times.

"The Aristocrats" probably won't figure largely in many social histories of post-Sept. 11 America. But right now, in the midst of ominous moves to silence disaffected Muslims in Europe, to stonewall open discussion of a debilitating mis-sold war, to muffle the detainees at Guantanamo and ramp up the shrill Patriot Act cheerleading at home, this movie has the liberating effect that Freud identified in jokes. It's unlocked something in the tamped- down, troubled zone of our collective unconscious. In a season when George Bush is keeping an open mind about creationism while ignoring a grieving mother at the end of his driveway in Crawford, Texas, we needed this movie. We really needed it.

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I know, I know: What does some dirty-joke movie really have to do with the war in Iraq and the war on terrorism and the war at the gas pump? Well, nothing, of course. And then again, quite a lot. It's all about our collective state of mind, the authentic state of the union that flourishes in our genuine openness and receptiveness, our willingness to be frightened and repulsed and unhinged by one another and still listen and react and somehow muddle along.

One of the most winning things about "The Aristocrats" is the small but palpable world it evokes, the community of stand-up comics who perform live, see and know each other's work, admire and dismiss, build on and reject what their colleagues are doing. Indeed, the whole movie is framed as a seductive insider's look at a joke that comics famously tell each other in private but can't use onstage. The movie then blithely proceeds to undermine its own premise: It puts the joke and everything about it right out there in full view.

How different, how clunky and inefficient all this old-school joke mongering seems compared with the culture's other great engine of free speech, the Internet. In that wide empowering universe -- the blogosphere, the blogocracy and all those other mouth-filling coinages -- anyone can speak up, say anything and be heard anywhere. It's thrilling, it's liberating and, may I say it, a little chilly and lonely, too. There's something about all those free speakers hammering away at their solitary keyboards and launching themselves into the blogosphere's endlessly expandable infinitude that both inspires and deflates. What does free speech mean, exactly, if everyone's freely chattering away in solo-capsule, gravity-free blogs? It's hard not to miss the traction and friction, the messy, bruising, grounded reality of real people in a real place: pre-Clinton town meetings, political conventions before they got packaged as infomercials, Roman forums, Greek amphitheaters.

Yes, there are vital virtual communities forming and re-forming out there in blogspace all the time, spontaneous constellations of like-minded souls. Remember what the Internet did for Howard Dean's campaign? Oh, and then how quickly it vanished when he let out that desperate yelp in Iowa? That was the sound of a man panicking, more powerful than 10 million demographically targeted e-mails.

Forgive me for my shade of uneasiness about the Web-wide blogocracy of free speech. Did anyone else find it pretty chilling, earlier this year, when MSN teamed up with the Chinese government to sanction certain words and phrases as "forbidden speech" on the company's Chinese-language blogs? The forbidden bits included "democracy," "human rights" and "Taiwan independence." Not going to happen here, we assure ourselves. But let's not forget that technology, corporate might and government will would make a powerful engine if put in the service of, say, some national security emergency.

In the bravura climax of "The Aristocrats," we finally see what the movie's been pointing to all along: a comedian telling the joke in front of a live audience. It's Gilbert Gottfried at a Friars Club Roast of Hugh Hefner. Dressed in a powder-blue tuxedo, with his tight little eyes crinkled shut in glee and his wide mouth fixed in a pugnacious grin, Gottfried pours it on, adding one detail after another about the family's revolting act(s).

The performance, it turns out, took place just a few weeks after Sept. 11, 2001, when the country was still reeling, tender and terrified, of every flickering shadow. Bad taste, which entertainers fretted about for a while back then, seems so absurdly beside the point now. And it was at the time. A joke, in its small, contrived but wonderfully focused way, can remind us where the real bad taste is -- out there in a fragile and menacing world, where we'd sure better keep talking to each other and trying to find a reason to smile. Jokes, as the philosopher Ted Cohen argues in his small, choice paperback of that name, are a means of intimacy and a shared relief from oppression. They are, he writes, among our most "reliable resources for meeting these devastating and incomprehensible matters."

As the camera flips back and forth from Gottfried at the Friars Club podium and an audience ecstatically unhinged by his delivery, it keeps catching a stony-faced Hefner on the dais. There he is, the man who rode the First Amendment to a fortune with his Playboy philosophy and anything-goes centerfolds, profoundly unamused. It's a telling juxtaposition and a perfect coda for "The Aristocrats." Free speech isn't easy and it isn't comfortable. It may not make you smile. It can certainly make you squirm. It's dangerous and risky, and it sure doesn't give a fig about bad taste. That's what makes it matter and what makes it free.